The Internet has seen a boom in the proliferation of online business sites since the inception of consumer-friendly browsers for accessing the World Wide Web. Some businesses market products directly to customers on their Web browsers. Other websites may exist for non-business purposes, such as online periodicals and news sites that survive by means of online advertising. An online advertisement may include a telephone number to call a business. Marketers who advertise for businesses want to be able to track the performance of their telephone numbers listed in advertisements by comparing the number of times the phone number was viewed by a consumer with the number of times it was called. To optimize their media spend return on investment (ROI), online marketers in particular wish to identify exactly which consumer who saw a number online ended up calling a business.
At one extreme, a single phone number is assigned to a single business regardless of the location of the consumer. All consumers from a number of locations would call the same number, so no single consumer and no single geographical area can be tracked. At the other extreme, a business is unlikely to be able to handle and afford a very large amount of advertised telephone numbers, each number being assigned to a single consumer. Even if 100,000 telephone numbers were allocated to a marketer for distribution to a business they were advertising on behalf of, it would be impractical to track 100,000 unique phone numbers.
To resolve this dilemma in the prior art, when an Internet marketer tracks callee statistics for a business, a single tracking phone number is allocated to a business. A marketer would obtain a new number in the same area code as the business. If the consumer sees that number advertised online and calls that number, the number still rings the business even though it is not the business's number. The marketer receives the call first, and then forwards the call to the business. Since the call is registered with the marketer and assigned to a business, that business is given credit for the call. The business would then be charged a certain amount of money for a given number of calls. Unfortunately, for this method, there is no concept of rotation of phone numbers on a per consumer basis. The number of times the delegated phone number was viewed versus how many times it was called cannot be tracked.
Accordingly, what would be desirable, but has not yet been provided, is a system and method that ties consumers who called a business back to consumers who viewed the business online by using multiple phone number pools to dynamically allocate numbers to consumers. It would also be desirable to have a method of reallocating phone numbers to different consumers for the same business such that when a phone number is called by a recently de-allocated consumer, that number still rings the same business.